Dr. Bev Bickel | Program Director
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Beverly Bickel is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral Program and Affiliate Associate Professor of Gender and Women Studies at UMBC. She is currently serving as LLC’s Acting Director. Her research broadly focuses on the production, exchange, and dissemination of transformational knowledge that supports institutional transformation and changing cultural practices that increase social justice and participatory democracy. This research aims at highlighting the essential role of building sustained relationships across differences while negotiating diverse knowledge sources, experiences, discourses and intellectual practices to address local and transnational transformational challenges. She is interested in how multiple truth claims and the discursive practices of people in diverse social knowledge networks operate in f2f and online public places and spaces. This work also investigates changing higher education cultures of publically engaged scholarship and the integration of research, teaching and service for higher education faculty members as well as how critical, feminist, and participatory pedagogies support the development of critical consciousness for students, K-12 teachers, college and university instructors, and community activists and leaders. Her research is based in interdisciplinary projects including the Teachers’ Democracy Project, the UMBC Breaking Ground initiative, and Imagining America.
Dr. Joby Taylor | Faculty
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Joby Taylor came to Baltimore as a Peaceworker Fellow in 1999 and liked the program and the city so much that he has proudly stayed on, becoming program director in 2003. Joby was born and raised in Miami, Oklahoma, a small town that is also home to eight Native American nations. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Gabon, Africa (91-93) helping build an elementary school in the village of Seka Seka, and, as all RPCVs soon find, he learned much more than he gave along the way. Joby’s involvement in service and service-learning has included other construction projects in the U.S. and the Caribbean, but also much work with youth, particularly at-risk and special needs youth. Academically Joby received his BA in Philosophy, an MA in Religious Studies, and completed his Ph.D. in the Interdisciplinary Language Literacy and Culture program. His dissertation is titled: Metaphors We Serve By: Critical and Constructive Play with the Discourses on Service. Joby lives in Baltimore City with his wife Beth and their two girls, Isabel and Katherine.
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